Good Morning Operators!

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend! I made some lemon-rosemary infused compound butter that I can’t wait to start cooking with. Also shameless plug for those of you in NYC - I am hosting a DTC Breakfast Club for founders & operators on Wednesday 2/21 with my friends Morgan (Tech Breakfast Club) and Ron (Obvi & Chew on This). We’re excited to see many of you there! If there are any brand operators you feel would benefit from having breakfast with us, feel free to share the invite with them.

Today’s newsletter is about the B - word, BRAND. Given all the debate around Top of Funnel marketing and whether or not it’s a worthwhile investment, I felt this was an interesting topic to dive into. Before we dive into today’s content, let’s hear from our sponsor, Nostra:

Today’s Newsletter is sponsored by Nostra. Nostra helps turn site visitors into customers, faster, by improving site speed and performance by 20-30% on average. Their best-in-class Edge Delivery Engine™ underpins the success of well over a hundred top Shopify stores, driving improved CVR, AOV, and more through speed. Nostra is a no-code solution, and customers see results in as little as 72 hours. Book a demo today!

What’s in a Brand?

Regardless of how you feel about investing in Top of Funnel media, I don’t think being a capital B Brand is necessarily correlated to TOF media investment. Brand entails a feeling that is communicated to shoppers who see you on the shelf at Target, or when they encounter your logo out in the wild. When your brand’s name is mentioned at a party, how do people respond? What do they feel? What do they associate with you? If you release a new product, are people lining up to buy it on release day? Does your brand trigger behaviors in others? These are all end products of strong brand equity - the core building block of capital B Brand.

Building Brand Equity:

Building brand equity begins long before you spend your first $1 on paid media. Fostering evangelism around your brand actually starts with your product and what it does for people that use/consume it. Then, it scales as the impact of that extends to those around them who also become consumers of the product, and so on and so forth. So if you build a crappy product, no amount of investment in advertising is going to help you. Read that again. If you build a crappy product, no amount of investment in advertising is going to help you. If you do manage to build a great product though, the journey of capturing your TAM might look similar to E.M Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation graph:

So, how do you do it? I try to think of it in this framework:

Build a product people actually want: If you’re building a product within an existing market, think about what other products aren’t offering that consumers are saying they want. Read product reviews and comb through social proof for the brands in your space to find that data. What are the actual consumers in this category saying about other brands and where they fall short?

Solve a problem people actually have: This is closely related to building a product people actually want. Solving a problem people actually have doesn’t necessarily mean that you only look at existing problems that exist in a market of interest, but it means asking the question “What would the impact on consumers’ lives be if they were able to do X / achieve ABC 3x more efficiently?”. Another consideration; “How would X be different if Y problem was solved?”. Think about what the invention of the internet did for commerce. Not only is it possible to buy anything and everything online, but it’s easy as heck to compare prices across different stores, and see where your product of interest is in stock if you want to “buy online and pick up in store”.

Build an experience that can be shared with others: Everything about every moment that a consumer is seeing, feeling, using, and talking about your product is the experience. Think critically about every aspect of your product and how it communicates this. What feelings might someone feel while using this product? What might they feel when they hear their friends talking about the product or using that product?

Why does this matter? I’m going to share a personal anecdote that some of you may relate to with one of the greatest capital-B Brands of all time - Apple. I remember being in high school and feeling as if I was one of the only kids in school without a smartphone (let alone an iPhone), the holy grail. There was a moment during my junior year where I was sitting at a table during my 4th period government class and there were 3 other kids sitting with me, all with iPhones in hand. It was a few minutes before class started so they were all gazing deeply into those black rectangular screens. I realized they were all texting one another, despite all sitting at the table together. One of them giggled at the 💩 emoji that was sent in their chat, and within seconds they all were sending emojis back and forth. It looked like an incredible time, and I felt very lonely and left out from that moment - I longed to be able to share that moment with others the way the 3 friends sitting with me had. Putting aside the discussion around the impact that consumer tech has had on the social skills of teenagers, I am specifically zooming in on the feeling of that product. These kids all had iMessage and were able to send emojis back and forth and that experience was part of what made and makes the iPhone a joy to use. iMessage is an experience that iPhone users can share with each other, and this has scaled to the point where there is a very clear blue text vs green text culture among smartphone owners (which is its own rabbit hole).

Once you build a great product that has Brand Equity, where you win is with Brand Storytelling.

Branded Storytelling: Brand Equity’s Engine

So you’ve built a great product, now what? Now it’s time to tell a great story. I’m going to dive into a few examples of this but I want to call out a few caveats: 1) All of these examples are from multi-billion dollar global brands 2) Yes, these examples are ads. I’m using these examples because they were easy to find and I think they convey these points well but I want to clarify, executing Branded Storytelling does not mean you need to have a multi-million dollar budget for marketing and creative. The point of Branded Storytelling is to help communicate the feeling someone experiences when they think of your brand. Feelings cannot be bought 🙂 

So how do you tell a great story? A non-exhaustive guide:

1) Build an emotional connection: This is all about the feeling that people experience when they consume, think about, or see someone consuming your product. You want that feeling to move them. Great brands do this through commenting on an experience or coloring an experience that many people can relate to. Oftentimes, great brands speak to something larger than themselves.

This Ad from Dicks Sporting Goods is a great example:

Why it hits: While this is a Dicks ad, it resonates because taps into the experience of growing up playing sports, and more broadly speaks to the value of what sports brings to us. Sports matter because of what they DO for us and for others. “Teams change people”, “Fields change towns”, “Seasons change futures”, “Coaches change character”, “Sports change lives”. 

This content captures the collective story of everyone who plays sports and vividly colors their lived experience.

How you can do this: If you want to build an emotional connection with consumers, talk to them about them. Focus your messaging around their lived experiences so they see your content and your brand and say “wow, they get me”. And if you want to create compelling video content with music, voiceovers, etc at a low cost, there are scores of fairly cheap/free AI tools that can create and edit images, videos, and more.

2) Create Brand Personality & Values: This is where you can share your core values. Think about how you might communicate “This is what we stand for”, “This is what we believe the future can look like”. Brands with strong values and personality effectively communicate their “Why” through their branded storytelling. “Why” is not “why our product is better than X”. “Why” is our reason for being, what we stand for and our vision for what we believe is possible in the future.

Here’s a great example from Nike:

Why it hits: Nike appeals to one of its core values, “Greatness” by deconstructing it. “Greatness, it’s just something we made up. Somehow we’ve come to believe that greatness is a gift, reserved for a chosen few.” The visual of the jogger running along the road is juxtaposed against this VoiceOver, which suggests that greatness is indeed attainable by anyone. I interpret this messaging to mean “We stand for the democratization of Greatness”.

The video goes on “Greatness is no more unique to us than breathing. We’re all capable of it.” This is a strong example of brand personality & value communication because of how Nike aligns itself with a future where its possible for “anyone" to achieve “Greatness”, and those who purchase their products are by extension a part of that mission.

How you can do this: Think about your core values as a brand. What do you stand for? What broader impact do you have in the world? What do you believe could be true about the future? Lean into messaging that communicates that effectively.

3) Foster Brand Loyalty & Advocacy: This is more about keeping your current customers & fans engaged and excited about you than it is about trying to attract new customers. You want your current customers to see your brand out in the wild and be excited that they saw you. If one of your customers saw your brand on the shelf at a local coffee shop, would they tell their friends about it?

Ocean Spray had a viral moment a few years ago that embodies this pretty well:

Why it hits: Because this video “accidentally” went viral and wasn’t created by Ocean Spray, it comes off as a very genuine promotion of the Ocean Spray brand. When I saw this video for the first time (and again while writing this) it impacted my perception of Ocean Spray in a positive way because it elicits a very “cool” and “chill” energy. Did it help that this video went viral? Absolutely, especially on the advocacy front. Fundamentally however, the reason this content fosters brand loyalty & advocacy is about how the brand is conveyed in a casual and unexpected manner, which makes it more likable.

How you can do this: While systematically going viral is much more of an art than a science, you don’t have to go viral to get your customers excited about you. Think about how you can appear in unexpected places to generate conversation - maybe that means you find a way to get featured on the shelf of a boutique clothing store in a trendy neighborhood, or maybe it means you work with a small creator to subtly include your product in their content without an over the top promotion (because everyone knows it’s an ad when Alix Earle says she’s “obsessed” with the 1,000th body oil that’s been sent to her this week).

That’s all for this week! A long read but a good one. I hope everyone enjoys the Super Bowl this weekend, we may end up seeing some more great examples of branded storytelling.

Zach